Monday Musings

31Oct

With another Monday morning comes another bunch of random musings. Herein I discuss my surgical follow-up, some personal astronomy-related bits, and work, among others.

Last week ended on a positive note, I think. Friday afternoon I saw my surgeon for my follow-up exam, and he told me that all the issues I’ve been experiencing were to be expected. I wish I’d been expecting them… The lump I had was plain old swelling and scar tissue, and the other issues were related to that. The tightness in my abdomen though was my muscle wall recovering from the injury at the surgical site, and that has mostly gone away during this weekend.

I did have some issues yesterday, where standing or walking caused a large amount of soreness in that area. I went to the store and bought some new pants (I dropped from 38×30 to 34×30 and these new pants are still too big for me). Walking through the store was nigh excruciating, and I was in a pretty foul mood by the time I’d gotten home. I’m not really sure what’s causing all this pain, but I suspect it has something to do with my nerves at the site of the surgery.

Ever since the surgery, the skin and general area around the surgical site has been completely numb. No pain, no touch sensation, no heat or cold sensation – just numb. Well, this weekend, I think it’s all waking up. The skin around there now feels painful to even the lightest touch, emitting a burning pain even when only my clothing touches it. I also get burning pain under my skin in the surgical site whenever I stand and stretch too quickly. That doesn’t last more than a few seconds, but it’s not comfortable.

I hope these issues don’t last too much longer. I’m planning to return home at the end of this week. I miss being home, around my kids, among my friends, and with my Tasha. It’s been difficult, being away, but I’m grateful I’ve had this option in the first place. If I weren’t able to stay away from the house, I think I’d still be in pretty bad shape.

I still haven’t done any sort of astronomy yet. I did manage to print a couple copies of the Sky and Telescope bimonthly planesphere for September / October and for November / December. That’ll help with my learning of the constellations, but I have to actually use them to get any benefit. I want to, certainly, but the nights are getting cold and I don’t have anywhere nearby to stargaze in the dark. These are excuses, because I could solve them easily, but for some reason it’s not a priority lately. I don’t think this is indicative of any lack of interest – I’m still interested, and motivated to do this, though my passion has been lacking lately.

I need to find my telescope eyepieces. Jupiter is just past opposition, making it at its biggest and brightest in the sky, and thus a great target for the telescope. I’d like to get a look at it high in the sky next clear night I get. The moon’s in its waxing crescent phase, growing larger by the night, and I’d like to get a good look at it before it gets too much brighter.

Work’s interesting already. I have very little on my plate so far this week, which always makes me nervous, but several things have popped up already to give me something to work on. A security-related bug was found in my primary project which I have to try and reproduce and fix, which should be several hours of work. Also doing some source control maintenance, moving projects out of Visual SourceSafe and into Subversion – this always makes me happy. The further away from VSS we get, the better off we’ll be.

I’ve also been informed that my proposal for a rather large refactoring has been given the initial go-ahead. I’m not able to start working on it just yet, as they’re trying to figure out how they’ll pay for the effort, but once that’s figured out I’ll be clear to start hacking up my code.

This refactoring will be my second biggest in this project so far. The target of the refactoring is a 700+ line component that is essentially the ‘brain’ of the application, but it’s grown organically over the last several months and is now a giant ball of mud having 8 separate responsibilities. This is bad – no one component should have more than one responsibility. Having so many jobs makes this one component the biggest source of bugs in the project. I’ll be taking this code, splitting it up into several new components and a few that already exist. This will simplify the code and make it easier to maintain and build upon.

I’ll also be upgrading the project from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4, which will give me access to new programming techniques that will allow me to simplify this thing even further, especially in future refactorings.

It’ll also make it easier for my co-workers to learn from it. One of my goals this year was to provide some knowledge transfer on this project to the rest of my team. This is going to be a difficult task – I wrote this project in C#, which no one else on my team is familiar with, and I used some advanced techniques that may be difficult to understand. With this refactoring I’ll be cleaning them up where I can, and providing documentation where I can’t.

I’m optimistic about this week. I’m confident my pain issues will subside; that I’ll start feeling normal again. I’m confident I’ll have plenty of work to do at the office. And I’m confident I’ll use whatever clear skies I can get to study the stars and rekindle my passion.

About Me

I'm a 33 year old programmer, writer, father of three, and amateur astronomer, philosopher, and physicist. I love the clear night sky, and I love sharing its wonders with anyone who wants to hear of them!